Flashpoints in Antioch race relations

• White: 39.65%
• Black or African American: 20.85%
• Other race: 15.21%
• Two or more races: 11.65%
• Asian: 11.58%
• Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander: 0.55%
• Native American: 0.51%

The new council majority fueled a conservative backlash and recall campaigns were launched at Thorpe and City Clerk Ellie Householder which both failed. Both failed before news of the mayor’s DUI arrest and the county sex case settlement involving him.

Another local controversy surrounded Torres-Walker when she was accused of obstructing or resisting a city police officer responding to a shooting call in her neighborhood in October 2021. Antioch police filed a misdemeanor charge on Nov. 9, 2021 against her, which was dismissed by the county District Attorney last month.

The racial and political friction tends to boil over in public comments at city council meetings. Defenders of Thorpe have often characterized his recall attempt a “lynching.” At the Oct. 11, 2022 meeting, one speaker using the name “Atticus Finch” called Thorpe a “coward” for not facing the public. Another public comment from Leslie May at that Oct. 11, 2022 meeting, stated that “a group of people from Antioch who formed a lynch mob against all the Black people working for all the citizens of the city.”

Another resident, Melissa Case, spoke at the same meeting on Oct. 11 and called out council supporters of Thorpe saying, “You stand behind this drunk, misogynist, narcissistic excuse for our mayor ...We should not support predators.”

Torres-Walker took some time during that same meeting to tell the audience about the list of names she has been called in public and online over the past two years in office. It was a list filled with obscenities, racial insults and tropes including the few we can print: “N-----r bitch,” “Jiggerboo,” and “Hood Rat.”

– Chris Campos